Why caramel crystallize after adding butter?
This weekend I tried making salted caramel following a recipe from Bon Appetit's Test Kitchen (The caramel part from https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/salted-caramel-chocolate-tart).
I noticed a little foam during the caramel formation but it did not give me much trouble at the moment, but later, when I added the butter, everything has gone awfully bad.
I took it off the stove to add the butter but it started to gain a sandy texture and a light yellow color. I put it on the stove again and kept adding butter hoping to solve it but it did not help.
In the end, I resolved by using half a glass of water, that lowered the temperature and melted everything back to a smooth deep amber sauce. After adding the cream and trying to reduce it to remove the added water, it went ok.
What did I do wrong? What happened?
P.S. In the recipe it asks for cream of tartar but I did not have it so I did not use it, is it the cause? I've seen other recipes without it, so I thought it was ok.
Best Answer
Acids, such as cream of tartar, can interfere with the formation of crystals by inverting sugars. Without it, you need to be more careful/lucky...
To quote Cooks Illustrated [It's for simple syrup but point still holds]:
Simple syrup crystallizes when enough of the sugar molecules stick to one another that they become insoluble in the water... To find a more effective solution, we had to understand why these additives helped. The cream of tartar and lemon juice are both acids that are able to break down sugar molecules into glucose and fructose in a process called inversion. So not only were fewer sugar molecules available to cluster together in our doctored syrups but the newly present glucose and fructose were physically blocking the remaining sugar molecules from one another.
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Quick Answer about "Why caramel crystallize after adding butter?"
From a practical standpoint, caramel sauces tend to crystallize because there's so much sucrose dissolved in so little water, so I doubled the amount of water to see what would happen if I made a more dilute quick caramel.What happens when you add butter to caramel?
Once the sugar has all dissolved and turned brown, we add butter. The heat of the caramel will melt the butter and create even more wonderful flavors. Finally, after the butter has melted, we add heavy whipping cream. This will allow the mixture to be loose enough to be used as a sauce.Why does my caramel sauce crystallize?
A "wet" caramel uses water and sugar; it cooks more slowly, but is prone to crystallising. Sometimes, as syrup boils, sugar starts to form back into crystals, which turn hard and cloudy. Crystallisation can be caused by stirring, or a grain of something other than sugar getting into the pan, or often just bad luck.Why did my caramel turn gritty?
Grainy caramel is caused by crystallization, which is easy to avoid (and can also be fixed). Caramel becomes grainy when the sugars crystallize, a process that happens when the melted sugar splashes up onto the cold sides of the pan. It loses its moisture and turns back into a sugar crystal.Can you recover crystallized caramel?
Fixing crystallized sugar during caramelization Your caramel can crystallize at two different points in time. First of all, it can do so when you try to caramelize it. It's actually quite common. If it happens, just add a little extra water, redissolve the sugar and continue going.What To Do When Your Caramel Crystallizes | Teaching Cooking Online
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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